Flash fiction project: one dark story per day, all the way through October, each one based on one normal thing gone wrong. More of this year’s stories here. You can find last year’s stories here, or at Amazon as October Nights.

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Normal thing: Random Acts of Kindness.

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THE CURSE

You’ve always had problems containing yourself into the person that other people think you should be. That one time you spent all the money in the joint account on video games, the other time that you seduced that teenaged kid in the back of the church—don’t worry, it wasn’t like in the middle of a wedding or anything and anyway you think he was homeless, the time you put bleach in your alcoholic father’s bottles of booze, but only the really cheap shit he was hiding in the garage, not the good stuff that your mom might drink in the cabinet over the old green fridge.

Why shouldn’t you do these things? Nobody seems to be able to explain it to you. Then one day, it’s like the slobs all rise up. It’s a witch hunt. Friends don’t answer your calls, or texts, or emails, or messages. They don’t answer the door even though you know they’re home, you can see the flickering of their TVs.

You go back and try to refine the past down to a point. Was it something you did? Didn’t do? You work it over in your mind until you’re almost sure you know what it is: when you knocked over your latte in Jeremy’s car, which you were borrowing, and you didn’t clean it up, and he couldn’t get rid of the smell.

Jeremy’s a sucker, though; that’s probably not it. Then you remember last Tuesday, leaning your head against the door of a vending machine at the community college, hungry and watching a protein bar dangling from the ledge and thinking, You have to wait until nobody can see before you kick it, if they see you it’ll be bad, and this guy gave you two dollars that you didn’t need so you could feed it into the machine and you said thanks and he said no problem and that was it, really.

Saying thank you to a sucker. That was the moment everything went to shit.